The Girl at the Window

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘Everything is good,’ I’d continued, ‘everything is just right. Will is happy in reception, I love my job, you love yours, and now … and now you’re going to risk your life on the other side of the world?’

  Abe had tipped his head to one side as he’d smiled at me, his arm around me, his fingertips grazing my shoulder.

  ‘There are kids out there, children Will’s age, who have no immunity to the diseases that the outside world is bringing in, who are seeing their home, their whole way of life, being ripped away around them, as they’re herded into smaller and smaller territories. Kids just like Will. It’s a few weeks of volunteering; I go out, I perform simple surgeries, help with the clinics, do a little bit of good, Tru.’

  I’d rested my cheek on his bicep, inhaling the smell of him.

  ‘Is it dangerous?’ I’d asked. ‘Peru?’

  ‘No! It’s all organised by the Red Cross, it’s perfectly safe. I’ll be away for a few weeks and then I’ll be home – you’ll barely notice the difference.’

  ‘Of course I’ll notice the difference – and so will he.’ I’d turned to look at Will. ‘We have hardly been apart since he was born. I’ll miss you.’

  ‘I’ll miss you, too,’ Abe had said, his mouth curling into that smile.

  ‘So why not just be a normal person who doesn’t go volunteering in rainforests and stay home?’

  ‘Come on,’ Abe had said, nudging me a little closer to him. ‘Are you telling me you don’t find handsome-activist-doctor me a little bit sexy?’

  ‘I can’t deny there is a certain frisson to it.’ I’d smiled in return. ‘You are a good man, Abe.’

  ‘Somebody’s got to be,’ he’d said.

  We spent the whole of that night on the sofa, with Will asleep next door, the window open a crack, the traffic noise rushing in, the sound of drunks tipping out of the pub, and we didn’t sleep for one minute of it, not until the dawn crept in.

  Abe went to Peru, and when he came back he was so happy, so full of energy at everything he had seen, everything he had done. He glowed with it, with a passion to do more. So when he said he was going to make it a regular thing, it never crossed my mind to try and talk him out of it. Why would it? I was so very proud of him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  After several minutes of scrabbling in the cupboard under the stairs, I find a rickety little trowel, the rowan-wood handle almost entirely loose. Switching my phone torch on, I head out into the dark of the misty late afternoon. The scent of bonfires and rotting leaves mingles with the rich, irony tang of the earth and the salty edge of the stones, so strong in the damp air that I can taste it.

  Out here, against the back wall of Ponden Hall, is the dead, half-rotten stump of an old pear tree. You would never know it was here; you’d never notice it if you didn’t know to look. But I knew that Emily’s Robert Heaton planted this pear tree as a sign of his love for her; it was one of the first stories that Dad told me when I was a kid.

  No one knows exactly why here at Ponden and not at the Parsonage – I always think it was to encourage her to visit more. There’s no record of a reason other than that he loved her, but here it is, close to the wall and rotting in the ground, a fragment of a young man’s heart enduring against two hundred years of neglect.

  Robert Heaton planted it long before Emily was dying and secretly sending him papers, so it wouldn’t be right beneath the roots, but somewhere nearby, something I’m glad of, because I don’t want to be the one to destroy this humble little relic of first love.

  In the narrow beam of torchlight I examine the surface as if, two hundred years later, I might find some signs of disturbance to point me towards a burial. But of course there are none.

  Where, where would he have put it? The package would contain paper, more than likely, so I hope to God he sealed it in something watertight, sheltering it from the elements as much as possible, in a place where he would be able to find it again easily.

  And then I realise the perfect place: in or up against the wall of the house.

  I draw a direct line in the dirt from behind the stump of the pear until I hit the wall and then I begin to dig. In this part of the garden the wall extends at least one floor below ground level, forming the outer wall of the old coal cellar. The earth is heavy, solid with clay and chalk, and after only a few scoops I lose the handle of the trowel completely. Taking the blade in my hand, I continue to dig, feeling the underside of my nails clogging with damp earth.

  Sweat begins to bead along my hairline, and my neck and shoulder are aching by the time the wall gives way and I dig out a cavity two stones wide that looks as deep as the width of the stones. Holding my breath, I shine my torch in; sure enough, right at the back of the gap I see a strongbox, metal and padlocked. For a moment I rest my head against the cool of the stone, until my heart rate gradually slows.

  This could be it. This could be the end of Agnes’s story. This could be Emily’s novel. The contents of this box could change history.

  Taking a breath to brace myself for another encounter with a helping hand, I reach into the dark. The stone cavity is slick with damp and some kind of slimy growth, but no freezing fingers search me out as I struggle to get purchase around the box. My knuckles graze against the stone as I drag it out, and at last drop it into my lap.

  It’s disappointingly light. Taking a breath I stand up, cradling it in my arms; it could almost be empty. There’s no sound of anything shifting or listing within. Standing in the square of light cast from the kitchen window, the iron padlock that secures the box in my hand, I realise I’m going to need a crowbar.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  There are three sheets of papers in the strongbox, plastered to the bottom of the box with damp and mould.

  Ma and I peer into the box to look at the papers, joined one to the other. Robert did his best. The box was almost airtight, but not quite enough. What’s more, the fragments that are left here are almost certainly not all that was once secreted within. The top piece of paper, in Emily’s hand, slighter, trembling on the page, tells me that.

  Dear Robert

  November 1848

  This novel, in three volumes, shall be called The House at Scar Gill and you need not fear, for I have changed the name of your family from Heaton to Akhurst. I enclose the first volume. Only you would I trust these pages with. Keep them safe, dear friend, until I may retrieve them; the rest will follow soon, God willing. I thank you for the further pages you have found in Agnes’s hand. Sometimes, in my delirium, I believe I hear her whispering her tale to me. I will return them when I am done and this story is complete. In truth, I know that none shall wish to publish a tale of such violence and scandal, but it is the tale that I must write. My sisters fuss over me day after day, and indeed I am weak and ailing. But I am certain that if I can see out the winter I will recover in the spring.

  Yours, believe me,

  EJB

  There is a novel, or at least a completed first volume of a novel, and Emily sent it here to Robert for safekeeping. Sinking into the chair I try and take in the enormity of what has been waiting in the wall of my house for more than 100 and fifty years. There was a second Emily Brontë novel, that is now certain; that is a fact.

  The House at Scar Gill.

  It’s such a huge shift in what we thought we knew about the Brontës, such a huge addition, that all I can do is sit here and let it sink in for a moment. And then there is more. Then there is Emily. These must be some of her last words, and they were words of hope and determination to survive. But within a few weeks of writing this note she would be dead.

  And then there is more of Agnes.

  Beneath this there is a title page, the edge to the title just visible behind her note, and beyond that, an almost-destroyed page of Agnes’s writing, just a few words at the end of each line, barely readable. I can just about make out ‘babe is born’, ‘Grace of God’, ‘hope and fear’, ‘Dear God, please help me!’

  The
words I thought I heard Will cry out in his room.

  Agnes has discovered she is with child and unmarried; somehow I know it as certainly as I do my own name. She must have been so afraid. And what happened to her ‘Dear Rob’ – did he simply leave her and his child to their fate?

  ‘What have you got there?’ Ma asks, wrinkling her nose at the smell.

  ‘More of Emily.’ I turn the box around so that she can see inside. ‘And the hint of there being even more, once. The House at Scar Gill – what a perfect title.’ I rub my filthy hands over my face in frustration. ‘What happened to it? Why would it be moved and the box put back?’

  ‘Maybe them that moved it didn’t want anyone to notice it was gone,’ Ma says.

  ‘You think someone else found out about it? Got to it first?’

  ‘We don’t know who was here at the house sale in 1898,’ Ma says. ‘It took place just after that Robert died and all of the family papers were supposed to have been burned, we don’t know why, and only a few, the ones in that tin, were secretly saved. It’s possible that the same person that found them knew about the true value of the books in the library, discovered something that Robert might have thought hidden.’

  ‘Oh God, I can’t bear it!’ I sink down onto the nearest chair, looking at the meagre contents of the box. ‘To have come so close and to find it stolen, destroyed or lost. Something so precious – it’s too much.’

  ‘It’s not all gone, though.’ Ma nods at the few sodden pages. ‘You can save those words and now you know a lot that one else knew before.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘I’m going to leave the box in the sitting room tonight. Don’t touch anything, OK? Tomorrow I’ll take it to Grace and start talks with the Parsonage about what to do next.’

  ‘Did she show you where it was?’ Ma asks as she leaves.

  ‘It just suddenly seemed to make sense,’ I say, still unwilling to admit what I half believe. ‘Robert loved Emily, so of course he’d hide something important to her close to something that reminded him of her. And poor Agnes, pregnant and alone …’

  ‘No wonder her soul is trapped here.’

  ‘Ma …’

  ‘She’d have gone on the street, most likely,’ Ma continues. ‘There was precious little charity back then. With no family, no father … She might have left the child as a foundling, they might both have died of starvation …’

  ‘What next?’ I say in some desperation. ‘Now I’ve found a little I want to find the rest, I want to know what happened to Emily’s novel, what happened to Agnes.’

  ‘If she really wanted to be helpful, Agnes could just tell us,’ Ma says, meeting my eyes. We stand there, perfectly still, neither one of us dropping the gaze of the other.

  ‘I’m hungry now.’ We both shriek and then laugh at Will, his face creased with sleep, his hair sticking up like fledgling feathers. ‘What?’ he says.

  ‘I’ll get tea on,’ Ma says.

  ‘I’ll get out of these muddy clothes,’ I reply.

  ‘You know what you should do, lass?’ Ma says. ‘You should write a book about what you’ve found. It’s your discovery and you know a lot about this subject. You got qualifications and that. You should write a book about it.’

  I stop in the doorway, turning the idea over in my mind. ‘I should, shouldn’t I, Ma?’

  ‘You should, lass.’

  ‘Ma,’ I say, ‘do you really think ghosts are real?’

  ‘Stranger things, lass,’ Ma says. ‘Stranger things.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  In the daylight, Castle Ellis looks completely different to the magical wonderland that Will and I first encountered. Autumnal mist, thickened by rain, weaves in and out of the spectral-looking rubble of what was once a formal tiered water garden, as we make our descent down the winding driveway.

  Without the benefit of the floodlights, you can barely see the glass and steel structure in amongst the ruined façade, just glimpses of it, like a forlorn spirit struggling to free itself from the brick-built ruin it is entombed in. In daylight, the crumbling and overgrown gardens appear ethereal and lost, and all the mismatched, broken angles seem to add to an atmosphere of unease.

  Looking up at the jagged remains of the original house clawing into the belly of the low sky, I realise that it is taking some effort on my part to battle back a sense of foreboding.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have read up on Castle Ellis’s history after my first visit. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have known that the castle had been completed in 1888, but the first owner had died before it was habitable. Or that the second owner and his eldest son died in a rail disaster just a few years later, both so disfigured by the catastrophic crash that no one is entirely sure who was buried in the family crypt. Or that, just a few days later, returning from his father’s funeral, the second son died from lead poisoning, thought to have been brought about by the freshly applied interior paint.

  Castle Ellis had remained largely uninhabited by the family after that, used only for day shooting parties, or the occasional festivity right up until it was torn apart by the explosives in the Second World War.

  Unlike Ponden, Castle Ellis was a house that was almost never lived in, an empty shell even before it was a shell, a skeleton house that never had a soul.

  But it does have the most beautiful library I have ever seen. That’s something to focus on.

  ‘Here we are,’ I say cheerfully to Will, as we pull up. ‘Our own personal castle for the day. Excited?’

  He looks up at the blackened stone window frames, the shadows of long burned-out flames still licking at the walls.

  ‘I don’t like it as much today,’ he said. ‘It feels sad.’

  He’s put his finger on it at once, and I’m surprised that I didn’t. It isn’t menace or doom that laces the misty air around the house, but a kind of grief. And the two buildings coexist, not in harmony, as I’d first thought, but in a constant tension. One is the captor, the parasite feeding off the other, but I can’t quite decide which is which.

  ‘You’ll like it fine once we’re inside, and you’re playing Minecraft on a full-size cinema screen,’ I say. ‘Want to put the key in the lock?’

  Will brightens, weighing the huge key in his hand for a moment before loading it, with some difficulty, into the lock, turning it with both hands until we hear a satisfying clunk.

  After tapping the entrance code into the covered keypad set into the stone, we both push the heavy door open, giggling at its ominous creak. As soon as we are inside we are faced with another control panel and, forgetting every instruction that Marcus gave me, I push on every single button with a sweep of my hand, watching the lights come on down the length of the corridor and throughout this bell jar of a house.

  ‘Do you remember where the playroom is?’ I ask my son, who suddenly has a skip in his step again. Will nods, running off across the polished stone floors, kicking his shoes off to skid round the corner in one seamless movement. How I can see Abe in him, the joy he takes in the things he loves. Catching up with him a few seconds later, I find him already ensconced on a beanbag, plugging himself into his virtual world.

  ‘I’ll be just over there,’ I tell him, pointing across the hall. ‘Please don’t break anything.’

  ‘OK, Ma!’ he says, and my smile turns into a grin as I let myself into the library, the heady scent of books lifting my spirits. My random switching on of lights has lit only half the room, and try as I might I can’t find a way to switch on the others, which leaves half of the room in shadow, made denser by the dark day outside. It hardly matters, though; the air is filled with the scent of very old books and the promise of discovery. Not Emily Brontë’s undiscovered second novel, of course, but even so, the thought of it hums under my skin.

  Very precisely, I set up my workstation right under a table lamp, and switch on all the other lamps that I can find.

  As the rainfall increases, so does the noise it makes, and the house rattles with each drop
that explodes on the glass before running down the angled surfaces in thick, syrupy sheets, making me feel almost like a fish in a tank, or, more accurately, swept out to sea.

  ‘Focus,’ I find myself saying into the watery grey room. ‘You have work to do.’

  Just the word work, and the idea of it, is enough to please me, and I find myself smiling as I look up at the seemingly endless shelves, heavy with mysterious titles. Where to begin? Logic says I should start at the bottom, but that seems too methodical, and if they aren’t shelved in any order it doesn’t really matter what order I start in, as long as I keep track. On the second landing I see some archive boxes and the deliciously irregular shelf-line of a row of very old-looking books. I’m going to start there.

  For a moment I’m afraid that the height and apparent fragility of the balcony might prove too much, but after recent events I discover that it takes more than a Perspex walkway to shake me, especially with a reassuring wall of books at my back. Leaning on the railing and looking down at the floor, I see the tiles have been cut and laid to look like open books, each intersecting with its neighbour. This really is a perfect room; I couldn’t have imagined it any better.

  Although there are archive boxes on the shelf, tucked a little back is an ordinary box file filled to the brim with an array of papers, badly stored and poorly cared for, their bent and torn corners reaching out of the closed file in a bid to escape.

  Taking my seat in the bright circle of safe light, I carefully open the box, tutting at the creased and crushed contents which talk to me at once, my heart singing in answer. At a glance, I can tell from the paper and the handwriting that the contents range over at least two hundred years. Two hundred years of probably just ordinary little bits of administration, bills of sale, letters of intent, records and accounts, but each one of them a crucial glimpse into the lives of those that came before, artefacts covered in the fingerprints of ghosts.